Caesar's Bicycle (The Timeline Wars, 3)

by John Barnes

  We drifted on; I stopped drinking soon enough to be sure of sobering up. As it began to get cold again, I checked our position and rate of descent; if the wind held, we would make Macedonia with twenty miles to spare, so we decided it wouldn’t be necessary for the two of us—just a bit alcohol-impaired if the truth be known—to make the dangerous climb up into the brazier and shovel out ashes. We pulled blankets over ourselves and sat idly chatting and eating some hardtack and fish paste; if I was short on sleep, at least I was well fed.

  An hour later we had descended to an altitude of only about a mile, and I put on the distance goggles and set them for infrared. Sure enough, there was a swath of coast to the east; though the moon had set and it was too dark to see, especially through the winter fogbanks, the distance glasses showed it thoroughly.

  “Piece of cake,” I said.

  Pompey seemed a bit baffled, and explaining it didn’t help much, but really explaining it was just a way to pass the time while we waited out the last hour before landfall in Macedonia. Unless he had a balloon himself, it would take Caesar weeks to get this far; we were perfectly safe. I just hoped that the same was true for Chrysamen, and for Paula and Porter.

  After half an hour I got impatient and decided to check again, so I put on the distance glasses and looked.

  The coastline was gone; there was nothing but water as far as I could see.

  I grabbed the thumbnail atlas, and the way I did must have tipped Pompey that something was wrong; he was instantly wide-awake and cold sober, and he said, “Are we off course?”

  “It looks like—”

  Then the image flashed up on the map, showing our course for the last hour and a half. We had come within three miles of the Macedonian coast.

  And then we had made a neat little buttonhook, and headed back out to sea. You can’t feel a change of direction in a balloon; since you move with the air, there’s no wind to go by, and the accelerations are usually very gentle. Thus there had been nothing to alert us to the reversal of our course. Not that we could have done much if there had been; we had no means of spilling warm air from the balloon.

  We were now only a thousand feet above the waves, and we were about fifteen miles out to sea, moving farther away from land every minute. “We forgot about the land breeze,” I said, suddenly realizing. “At low altitudes, the wind blows strongly away from land during the first few hours of the night.”

  “You forgot,” Pompey said cheerfully. “I never knew. Well, I’m glad we saved the oars, and I’m glad you still have your wonderful little navigation gadget. I predict we will have no trouble at all keeping warm tonight.”

  16

  Fortunately for us the sea was reasonably calm, which doesn’t happen often in those waters, and most especially not in January. The balloon settled gracefully, and the one sandbag still dangling turned out to be invaluable, for when it hit the water it took on seawater and sank, pulling us down instead of leaving us bouncing. We rose and fell ever so slightly on the sea, the balloon still holding its lines taut above us.

  We waited five minutes, to let the balloon cool further, and then cut the sandbag free, sending it to the bottom. The boat stopped listing and righted itself; we began to saw through the lines on the bag of the balloon itself. We didn’t want to run the risk of capsizing, so we cut them in pairs, diagonally, one of us on each side of the boat, until finally we severed the last pair of lines and the gasbag rose slowly and majestically above us, drifting off downwind at a few miles per hour.

  We turned from watching it go to getting out the oars; the thumbnail atlas could be used to hold us on a course, so we plotted the shortest one to the coast—it was all stony beaches along there anyway, and it wouldn’t much matter where we came in, we’d be walking for quite a while—and started pulling away. I was in pretty good shape, though tired, and Pompey seemed to be up to the job as well despite his overweight. Though the wind was against us, it was close to low tide now, and in another hour would be running in our favor; unfortunately, tides in the Med don’t amount to much, but we’d take anything we could get.

  Rowing is not a real efficient way to get anywhere; that’s part of why it’s such good exercise. After a long hour and a half, we took a break for some cold food, and to work a little congealed bacon grease into our hands. By now we were in fairly thick fog, and all the more grateful for the thumbnail atlas. We seemed to be drifting a little toward the coast at this point, probably on some local current, and I figured we might as well take advantage of it.

  We had just finished the meal—and it was occurring to me that I had been up for almost thirty straight hours and that getting us navigated to the coast was about as much as I could do before I would have to sleep, whether I really trusted Pompey or not—when we heard a strange sound; a splashing that sounded like a big rock with water running against it, or maybe—

  The prow of the ship reared out of the fog like a dark avenging god. There was no time to do anything before it was upon us; we weren’t hit right on the prow, but slapped hard to the side, hard enough to capsize the boat and hurl us both into the water.

  The black waters of the Adriatic closed over me and instantly I was chilled to the bone, colder than I had ever been before. I came up for air with the lookout’s cry ringing in my ears, and something splashed next to me; instinctively I grabbed it and felt it drag me forward in the water. Stupid, half-frozen, and still exhausted by my lack of sleep, I took long seconds to realize they had thrown me a log with a rope tied to it, and were dragging me in.

  Minutes later I was alongside, bumping the side of the ship, and they were shouting for me to hold on tight. A few quick heaves brought me out of the water and sprawling on the deck. I looked to my left and saw Pompey, gasping and blowing like a fish.

  There were shouts and cries all over the sea, I realized, many of them from the ship we had been brought into. We were not merely in a passing freighter, but in some kind of a fleet.

  They rolled us unceremoniously onto stretchers and carried us downstairs. I felt sailors’ hands searching around on my body but couldn’t seem to move my arms to stop them, not even when they began to pull my clothes off; then I heard some exclamations.

  Suddenly there was a blinding glare; I blinked indignantly, as I had been almost asleep, and then saw two men bending over us. “Well, we know who this one is,” the older man was saying, looking down at Pompey. He was a small, plump older man who could easily have played a corrupt city councilman, a rude uncle, or perhaps an unsuccessful car salesman in any Hollywood picture, wearing a lumpy-looking not-quite-straight toga under his cloak. “Though how he got here or what he’s doing here is a complete mystery.”

  The other fellow was tall and thin, and when he looked more closely at me, he said, “Oh, I know who this one is, too.”

  My blurry eyes focused, and I said, “Caldwell?” He looked just slightly familiar, and I couldn’t think why.

  “Yep. Looks like somebody decided I needed rescuing, back at ATN’s Central Command. And might be they’re right.”

  “How—did—you—know—me?” I said. Plainly the older guy must be Crassus, and we had found what we were looking for; so there couldn’t be anything so important that it couldn’t wait until I got some sleep.

  I was just drifting out when he said, “A few times they had me doubling for you, though god knows we don’t look alike. I sure hope you’re not mad about the little joke on the airliner, years ago—”

  “Small universe,” I muttered, and fell asleep.

  When I awoke, twelve hours later, Pompey was already up and about. My clothes had been wrung out and mostly dried and were sitting at the foot of the bed. I figured I wasn’t a prisoner, since my thumbnail atlas, spare clips for the .45, and distance glasses were on top of the pile, along with the .45 itself, still in its shoulder holster. I got up and went up on deck, to find it was another warm, sunny day. I borrowed some olive oil from the cook (it’s not gun oil by any means, but it beats the h
ell out of saltwater), went and found the others, and sat stripping, cleaning, wiping, and reassembling my weapon while I got caught up on what was going on.

  Once I heard it, it all fell into place. Walks-in-His-Shadow Caldwell (he was a Mandan, from a timeline where they had been much more successful in dealing with the white man and had a state of their own in the High Plains) had been over in Persia and India, getting his innovations introduced among the Bactrian Greeks that Alexander had scattered through that area two hundred years before, and creating a new trade network, one of many, for Crassus’s banks and trading companies to control. “Give it a hundred years,” Caldwell said, “and I think we’ll have Roman roads from Lisbon to Saigon, carrying trade in quantity both ways. And probably railroads as well, if I can ever get us off the jam point with making good quality iron, which is turning out tougher than I expected.

  “But anyway, when I got back and heard that Caesar hadn’t been kept in line with Crassus’s cash, like we were hoping he could, then it was obvious the Civil War was going to break out after all, and right on schedule. That’s an obvious catastrophe—I mean, look at what happened even in the unaltered timeline, the Romans lost two whole generations of young men and had huge numbers of foreigners to demob from the legions and settle into Roman society. This could be a lot worse—what you saw at the Battle of Falerii was an example. Neither side really understands in the gut just how much muskets, horse pistols, field artillery, and for that matter plain old stirrups will add to the slaughter.”

  “Oh, I’m getting an idea of it,” Pompey said, a little impatiently. “Yes, I realize neither Caesar nor I had ever fought against an army equipped with firearms, and we had no idea how much damage could be done to our own forces. The butchery was dreadful, and there isn’t really time to retrain, either, so I imagine the next battle will be just as bad.”

  Crassus nodded; he was swaddled up in six blankets and looked like he should be playing some role written for Rodney Dangerfield as he sat there, sipping spiced wine from a cup. “For that reason, Cnaeus, I was delighted to pass my imperium to you. I’m not so stupid as to have any trouble telling who the real general is here. Do you see no way of minimizing the slaughter?”

  Pompey spread his hands. “I don’t, and I doubt that Caesar does. If only we could trust him—but his genius is so influenced by Mercury, you know, and by Venus. He might decide to offer honorable terms and then abide by them. Now that he has wiped out the Senate, for every practical purpose, there is no longer a Roman Republic—there is only Rome and its territories. There’s no reason why the Triumvirate could not be put back together, perhaps some kind of new Senate created, and our offspring intermarried enough to create a workable ruling house and line of succession, as long as we avoid that explosive word ‘king.’ I have a son who is Caesar’s grandson, you know, and if you have a suitable granddaughter, Marce—”

  “This is all in anticipation,” Crassus said firmly. “Even if he makes us a decent offer, it will be hard to know whether or not he will keep his word. He has generally been an honorable man—but there’s his treatment of the Gauls to be considered, and I find that I feel that if a man keeps his word only when it’s not too inconvenient, you might as well just say he doesn’t keep his word, and have done with it. I think if he beats us, he will want to consolidate his power, and therefore will be generous—perhaps astonishingly generous—in peace, hoping to make allies of us. By the same token, if we win, and we are generous … well, Caesar was always a man who was either at your throat or at your feet. I am afraid we cannot treat him in the way he would treat us.”

  By the time we finished our conversation, we were coming into the harbor at Barium, which Pompey and I had passed over the night before. The night’s fog was gone, and I could see that there were hundreds of ships following Crassus’s lead vessel; they had made an unprecedented night crossing, taking advantage of the sea breeze at night in Greece and the land breeze in the morning off Italy, because Caldwell also had a thumbnail atlas.

  Nobody would have expected them anytime so soon, and with luck they would be one full day’s travel on their way to Rome before Caesar’s agents alerted him.

  Moreover, Caldwell had come up with a secret weapon—the rubber-coated horseshoe. Apparently in his timeline the horse had lasted a little longer in competition with the automobile, and it was discovered that horses’ feet, like anyone else’s, preferred “sneakers” for walking on hard pavement. The Romans didn’t even shoe their horses, so what Caldwell’s newest innovation meant was that Crassus and Pompey could bring a much larger force of cavalry onto the field. Further, he had duplicated Caesar’s field artillery, though he didn’t have quite so much of it, and the armorers even now were looking at Pompey’s multiple-rocket launcher.

  Of course, Caesar might have a trick or two of his own.

  Pompey had stolen the horse pistols, hoping to have them duplicated for the next time he commanded cavalry, but oddly enough it didn’t matter that they had gone to the bottom of the Adriatic. Crassus had brought something better than the pistol; he had Parthian cavalry.

  The Parthians were a tough bunch of nomads who had been running Persia and most of Mesopotamia before Crassus turned up with muskets. (In my timeline, or for that matter in Caldwell’s or Chrys’s, Crassus and a Roman army had been wiped out by the Parthian cavalry at Carrhae in 53 B.C. I thought it wouldn’t be discreet to mention that.) The secret of their success was a short, powerful bow and ages and ages of practice at firing it from horseback.

  Caldwell had given them stirrups, for a more stable platform, and the compound recurve bow—which meant that they had three or four times the rate of fire, accurately and at longer range, than Caesar’s Gauls did. Plus, if we met somewhere in the middle of Italy, as was expected, Caesar’s cavalry would have many more horses unfit for service, due to fast marches on winter roads, than Pompey, whose Parthian archers would have shod horses.

  We had superiority in cavalry. He had superiority in field artillery—Caldwell had only been able to make a few pieces, and his crews had nothing like the experience of Caesar’s legions. And naturally infantry would be what would settle it anyway, and that was about even. So at the moment it looked like a toss-up.

  They were planning to stay one day at Barium, and Pompey was already trying to figure out how to get kneelers and musket holes on every scutum, plus have enough drill time to get everyone acquainted with Street Firing. I told him about the hollow square technique that was used in the eighteenth century of my timeline for a defense against cavalry, and he groaned. “Oh, Jupiter, Marce, not another thing for them to learn. These forces are good—no, they’re magnificent—but so much to learn in one day, and then to march the next and quite possibly fight within days of then! And if you’ve got a defense against the kind of cavalry attack that threw my flanks back at Falerii, I have to make time to teach it to my men. I can’t let them die from being underprepared.” He sighed again, turned back to work, and then sent a legate after me to take down notes on everything I remembered about the hollow square, which wasn’t nearly enough.

  The reason that we had sailed into Barium, instead of other ports like Brundisium or Tarentum, was that it offered the maximum surprise; if we had sailed farther up the coast, the next road suitable for moving legions was at Hadria, hundreds of miles to the north, and we’d have been detected; if we had come in any farther south, we would have had to travel farther by road, giving Caesar more lead time. Barium, located right where the heel joins the Italian boot, was perfect, with a road connection from the Via Minucia to the Via Appia, and thence to Rome. It meant a long hard march for Caesar, no way of sneaking around to get at our backs, and therefore—we hoped!—victory.

  Always assuming Caesar didn’t think of something even more clever.

  Even in winter, the southern parts of Italy are mild, and it was a bright, sunny day in Barium. I enjoyed a day of loafing, went to bed early, and found myself on a bicycle, riding with Caldwell an
d the generals, very early the next morning. At least this mission was getting my thighs in shape.

  We took our time, keeping the army and the horses in peak condition and also giving us more time to drill. We camped that afternoon just twenty miles from Barium and spent several more hours working through everything—Street Firing, hollow squares, firing from behind the scutum. The next town of any size was Canusium, a bit over twenty miles away, and we rode there the next day and repeated the process. It was deliberately kept pleasant and simple, but discipline was kept tight.

  “What I hope,” Pompey explained to me, “is that Caesar will note, for example, that Canusium threw open its gates for me. With a bit of luck we can make it appear that the whole south is solidly for us, and our slow, steady progress will help put political pressure on him to beat us before too many territories ally themselves to our cause. Already we’ve got a dozen garrisons in the south going over to our side.

  “And if he’s forced to act quickly, then it is all to our advantage to keep our marches short. He’s going to have to come to us for his battle, and I want him to have to come a long way in a hurry.”

  Before dawn, I was dozing uneasily in the room that had been found for Caldwell and me in Canusium when suddenly there was a crash of horns and the sound of many feet running. I jumped up and was dressed just an instant before a messenger boy arrived to tell us that we were needed in Pompey’s quarters.

  When we got there, the noise and confusion were overwhelming, but Pompey looked as if he always rose at this hour and had just gotten out of his morning bath. “Well,” he said, “I have to admire the old bastard. Caesar not only got here, he found a way to get behind us, and one that few Romans could resist. He’s at Cannae—the battlefield where Hannibal won his biggest victory.”

  I looked at the map spread out before us. Cannae was almost on the coast, less than ten miles from Canusium in the valley of the Ofanto. “How did he—”